Washers

And clearly, you have to listen to what they don't say. They don't say, Oh, this information is wrong. It's fraudulent. It's incorrect. It's inaccurate. In fact, in a perverse and unintentional way, they testify to its validity when they say, Oh, the release of this information is going to put lives at risk. Like the professor says, this reflects the understanding that if people knew what was really going on, they'd turn against it. But I think it goes deeper still. I think it's an error to believe that the Administration and its Pentagon do make or can make some clear distinction between the publicly acknowledged war and the secret reality of it. One of the first lessons you learn in any large agency or organization that values the partitioning, compartmentalization, and controlled dissemination of information is that the organization will quickly come to believe its own obfuscatory bullshit. In the effort to concoct a believable story and to assemble the evidence in such a way as to gird its believability, they come to believe their own press releases. The incantatory repetition--this is not the whole picture, this is not the whole picture, this is not the whole picture--of the limits of leaked documents represents a legitimate moment of cognitive dissonance. The Administration is saying: this is not reality as we wish it to be, therefore it is not reality. Really it's just indicative, once more, of how thoroughly, banally ordinary Obama is, how similar to all his predecessors, the latter Bush most of all. Bush preferred to couch his unreality in a high moral dander, while Obama prefers a sort of managerial proceduralism that he, like many second-rate intellects, mistakes for deliberation and deliberateness, but at root, he is equally a fantasist.